The after market is of great importance of a company’s competitiveness and an increasing part of its revenues can be derived from it. Remanufacturing, in focus of this thesis, is a great business opportunity and the European market has an enormous growth potential. In the USA it is a major business and the automotive industry, targeted in this thesis, sells approximately 60 million remanufactured automotive products compared to 15 million products in Europe for an equivalent stock of vehicles Compared to manufacturing, the remanufacturing environment is a more complex business due to the high degree of uncertainty in the production process, mainly caused by two factors: the quantity and quality of returned cores. Overall, seven characteristics that make the remanufacturing material flow harder to control have been identified. Emerging in the 1990’s the concept of Lean production is a well-known method for improving the manufacturing capabilities of a company. Lean production, which is said to increase productivity, decrease lead-time and costs and enhance quality, is widely adopted.In this thesis, the purpose is to explore what characteristics of the remanufacturing environment that can hinder the implementation of Lean production principles of material flows and how Lean principles can be employed in a remanufacturing environment.In accordance, the theories of Lean production and Remanufacturing are used and the research methodology chosen that of a case study. To assess material flow, the production flows of five major product groups in a car engine are assessed. For the collection of data, Value Stream Mapping (VSM) methodology…
Contents
1 REMANUFACTURING – A GROWING INDUSTRY WITH INHERENT INSTABILITY
1.1 PURPOSE
1.2 EARLIER RESEARCH OF LEAN PRODUCTION IN REMANUFACTURING
2 WASTE REDUCTION AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE PRODUCTION – THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 THE REMANUFACTURING SYSTEM
2.1.1 The different steps of remanufacturing operations
2.1.2 The seven characteristics of remanufacturing
2.1.3 Uncertain timing and quantity of returns
2.1.4 Need to balance returns with demand
2.1.5 Disassembly of returned products
2.1.6 Uncertainty in materials recovered from returned items
2.1.7 Requirement for a reverse logistics network
2.1.8 Complication of material matching restrictions
2.1.9 Stochastic routings for materials and highly variable processing times
2.2 LEAN PRODUCTION
2.3 MATERIAL FLOW ISSUES IN LEAN PRODUCTION
2.3.1 Production to Customer Orders (Customer pull)
2.3.2 Create a levelled workload
2.3.3 One piece flow and reduced setup times
2.3.4 Takt time
2.3.5 Just-in-Time deliveries (JIT)
2.3.6 Stable production process
3 METHOD
3.1 ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK
3.2 LINE OF APPROACH
3.3 THE CASE OF VOLVO PARTS FLEN AB
3.4 THEORETICAL FOUNDATION AND DATA COLLECTION
3.5 OPERATIONALISATION
3.6 TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE THESIS
3.7 ETHICAL ISSUES
4 THE MATERIAL FLOWS OF A CAR ENGINE
4.1 VOLVO PARTS FLEN
4.2 THE CURRENT CAR ENGINE FLOW
4.2.1 Planning structure
4.3 PRESENTATION OF RESULTS AND ANALYSIS OF THE CURRENT STATE
4.3.1 Pre-disassembly
4.3.2 Disassembly
4.3.3 Cleaning
4.3.4 Reprocessing
4.3.5 Reassembly
4.3.6 Testing
4.4 HINDRANCE OF LEAN PRINCIPLES ON AGGREGATED LEVEL
4.4.1 Planning principle
4.4.2 A parallel flow and transportation
4.4.3 Balancing demand with returns
4.4.4 Determining economic order quantities
4.4.5 Lead-time analysis
5 PROPOSAL OF HOW TO MAKE THE FLOW LEAN – A FUTURE STATE
5.1 PRE-DISASSEMBLY
5.2 DISASSEMBLY
5.3 CLEANING
5.4 REPROCESSING
5.5 REASSEMBLY AND TESTING
6 EIGHT PROPOSITIONS OF LEAN REMANUFACTURING
6.1 FUTURE RESEARCH
REFERENCES
APPENDIX
Author: Mähl, Maria,Östlin, Johan
Source: Uppsala University Library
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